Rare galaxy with 2 black holes has 1 starved of stars

January 5, 2016
byMarcia Dunn

This image provided by CU-Boulder shows the galaxy SDSS J1126+2944 taken with the Hubble Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory, with an arrow placed by the source pointing to a black hole that lost most of its stars. The University of Colorado's Julie Comerford has discovered something even rarer than a double-black hole galaxy: a skinny black hole. Her findings were reported Tuesday, Jan 5, 2016 at the American Astronomical Society's annual meeting. (NASA/CU-Boulder via AP)

An astrophysicist has discovered something even rarer than a double-black hole galaxy: a skinny black hole.

The University of Colorado at Boulder's Julie Comerford reported her findings Tuesday at the American Astronomical Society's annual meeting in Kissimmee, Florida.

To date, only 12 galaxies are known to exist with two black holes in their midst, Comerford said. Normally galaxies have a single supermassive black hole at the center, equivalent to 1 million to 1 billion times the mass of our sun.

But in this newly identified galaxy about 1 billion light-years away, one of the two black holes is significantly smaller than the other and apparently starved of stars. Black holes typically are surrounded by stars; this one appears "naked."

Comerford speculates the slim black hole lost mass in the collision of two galaxies that merged into this one —" a crash diet." Or it's a rare example of an intermediate-sized black hole that likely will morph over time into a supermassive monster.

Astronomers have yet to confirm an intermediate-size black hole, which makes Comerford's streamlined target extra tantalizing. Intermediate black holes are 100 to 1 million times the mass of our sun.

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8 comments

Maybe stuff buried in those holes can be coaxed.....out by a BIGGER supermassive hole....about the size of my ex daughter in law..lol. Just may be one such starvin' Marvin will become unstable a la Hawking and ......explode!!

The event horizon would be much more smaller then the super heated gas represented in pink.I do not think one black hole has a stronger intensity in gravitational pull then the other only a larger radius of influence.

Black holes typically are surrounded by stars; this one appears "naked."

Or this naked one is actually grown bigger and more active than the companion, expelling more new gas in all directions whereby nearby stars simply can no longer form. I consider this another likely example of a naked core star, though LaViolette would disagree calling it an outward propagating superwave of cosmic rays.

nikola_milovic_378

He suggests this another example of the core fissioning process, spawning the second core. And he notes that there is no evidence that the naked core is surrounded by the stars of an incoming merging galaxy.

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